InfoQ Homepage Functional Programming Content on InfoQ
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The Roots of C# 3.0: F# and C-Omega
Tomas Petricek talks about C# 3.0 and the languages that led to many of its new features. The two languages that most inspired C# 3.0, F# and C-Omega, are discussed in detail along with how the features changed as they moved from the research languages to C#.
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F#: Two Remarkable Years
The functional programming language F# was first announced by Don Syme of Microsoft Research in 2005. Two years after its release, it has already made significant progress towards becoming mainstream. One of its most noteworthy achievements is that it was used by the DOE Joint Genome Institute to create Darren Platt calls "the fastest genome assembly viewer I've ever seen".
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What should Lambda Expressions in Visual Basic Look Like?
In order to support LINQ, Visual Basic is adding support for lambda expressions. Lambda expressions are essentially inline functions and are a corner-stone of functional programming languages like Lisp and Haskell. As the next version of Visual Basic edges ever closer, certain syntactical issues need to be addressed.
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Starfish Brings Google-Style Distributed Processing to Ruby
An implementation of MapReduce, a process invented by Google to easily split up tasks to be performed by hundreds of machines, is brought to Ruby in a library called Starfish.
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Functional Programming in Java with Generics and CGLib
Those interested in Functional Programming usually have to use a well suited-language like Scheme, Haskell, Ruby, or Groovy; or, in Java, use Anonymous Inner/Local classes to fake it like commons-collections. Ray Cromwell has a method for doing FP in Java using Generics and CGLib with less code and type safety.
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Scala: combining the best of Ruby and Java?
Like Ruby, Scala has a very terse syntax and its extensibility makes it suitable for writing DSLs, like Java, Scala is statically typed and can call Java code seamlessly without any declarations or glue code. Scala founder Martin Odersky (who co-designed Java Generics and implemented javac) has started blog today with his first entry on the history which led up to Scala.
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Nemerle: A Hybrid Programming Language For The .NET Platform
Nemerle is a hybrid language developed by the Computer Science Institute of the University of Wroclaw in Poland. It is a high-level statically typed language that offers functional, object-oriented, and imperative features. It has a simple C#-like syntax and a meta-programming system.